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Looking Backward by Claudette Pendry

I’m sorry, I believe that few will want to hear my voice but hear goes. My memory is different than most , I guess. So I want to go a bit backward to a time when there was respect for the home. Not all were perfect to be sure but society respected women who loved their husbands and the family. Women dressed like women, raised little girls who learned how to do most things while wearing skirts and dresses. Women cared about proper manners and respected their elders, would salute the flag and read the Bible and would teach it to their children. Husbands treated their women like the godly lady she was. They treated each other with care and respect. I had a home like that once — my mom stayed home drove us to school, cooked all our meals, made our clothes. She loved our father, even if she had a problem with him, and I’m sure she did since he was human. She never embarrassed him in public. Her children grew up to respect all authority and was respected in the community. An America that supported the Bible and was one nation under one God.. We had few social problems that were discussed openly because were were taught to work together privately to solve them, because the Bible taught us not to talk of things done in secret. I felt safe in that world, the home I lived in and I respected my parents. I had many troubles because of my own failures, my lack of wanting to study, but not my lack of parents. Later in life I found out from teachers and pastors how I could be a grownup and put away childish things in my past. Why is the darkness and what we were taught as sin, that part of us that wants to do wrong by what we see , think, or do that displeases God, why is it praised in my world today? Could it be that we the people have turned away from the One True God?

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6 Responses

Can we ever have that world again? I’ve wondered about that many times. I miss having men and women who were kind and courteous. I miss the days when everyone seemed to love America. I miss the days when order and respect for laws was taken literally. I don’t know if anger and hatred and lack of integrity have brought us into today but the past just seemed fairer to everyone.

I hear you and appreciate your heartfelt comments about life as we knew in the 50’s. There’s nothing wrong with respect . . . Which I feel is greatly lacking in our society. Times have certainly changed along with our roles and responsibilities. We can’t go back to the good old days but look to the future with hope and courage.

There were good times, when people were kind and there were more 2 parent households. I think part of the problem was some men did not take care of their families, some women didn’t feel loved and respected, and as you say, some social problems were not talked about, but instead, swept under the rug, hidden from outside the family. I don’t want to over simplify but these problems contributed to an unrest that cause women to want more respect and freedom.

Claudette, here’s the question. How can those of us who are still reeling in shock and horror after the election, but madly marching and organizing and desperately calling our congresspeople, get together with people like you so that together we can save the country we both love? The past, imagined or real, is gone forever and can’t be brought back. Our job now is to use all this accumulated wisdom we’ve earned by living so long to create a future we’ll never see. That is the role of “elders.” But even we elders are so divided along ideological fault lines that we can’t communicate, and so our country and our American culture, now in grave, possibly fatal peril, cannot be influenced by us, its most seasoned minds. Can you think of any way for us to set aside religions and our personal notions about the way everybody should dress and think and act, just long enough to join together and bring our country back from the crumbling precipice whereon it now hangs?

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